Not all of Langer’s ventures are concerned with life-threatening disease or crippling injury. By day six, it was maybe the same. Now what they do is they make a little incision in you, and the gallbladder, you would pull it out through these little scopes. First, because the particles are tiny, they’re tiny enough that you can actually use them to carry different drugs to cells. I was pretty naive about this. I think that happens. He graduated from Cornell in 1970 and pursued graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The secret to doing it is sometimes misdirection. And I do think — and this relates to the earlier questions — the media can play an unbelievably important role in terms of educating everybody in the country — in the world — about how exciting and all the good things that science and engineering can do. That same year, Robert Langer received the Priestley Medal, the highest honor of the American Chemical Society. When blood hits the surface, the artificial heart forms a clot. Could you take us through a typical day in your lab? So those are all really, to me, interesting examples of how you can take, on the one hand, engineering and material science, and on the other hand, biology and medicine, put them together and try to create new things that can maybe someday improve cancer therapy and diagnosis. I still love magic. Finally, we have been involved in creating approaches to engineer new tissues. Someday, you’ll be able to make new tissues and organs, and that to me is just a gigantic step forward in terms of every part of your body. I think that in the academic system, you can get enough credit if people end up citing you a lot because you published something early. If somebody has a bad heart, you can’t do that much. He fared no better when he submitted research proposals to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But when I did that, I had a lot of trouble getting a job, because they all felt I wasn’t doing engineering. I’ll give an example. I think there is so much that needs to be done on that area, and I think it offers so much potential. I think the media, especially in our country, really glamorizes movie stars and athletes far more than science and math. But as I looked into this, I found that was almost never true. His first nine research grant applications were turned down. But you’re probably going to fail in science a lot more than you succeed, so you really have to learn how to deal with it and not let it beat you. The clot can go to the patient’s brain, they can get a stroke and they can die. In many cases, we haven’t even created the right ones yet. He is one of three living individuals to have received both the U.S. National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.[33]. From an engineering perspective, what would you say are the most amazing engineering feats of the human body? Don’t feel over-impatient. As his ideas achieved success in the marketplace and acceptance in academia, Langer’s position at MIT became more secure and he was given a full professorship. So I think it cuts both ways. [29], Robert Langer has been involved in the founding of many companies,[75] more than twenty in partnership with the venture capital firm Polaris Partners. The Langer Laboratory has served as an incubator for 40 independent companies. Robert Langer: That’s a great question. If we look back to other people who have been creative inventors, like Thomas Edison, has anything fundamental changed in the inventive process since then? There’s different kinds of inventions. Dr. Langer has written over 1,400 articles. So we actually filed the first patent in the history of Boston’s Children’s Hospital in 1976, and the patent office turned it down. I remember, what happened is we were infusing the substance. Langer's idea was to encapsulate the angiogenesis inhibitor in a noninflammatory synthetic polymer system that could be implanted in the tumor and control the release of the inhibitor. And then you could actually put that string at room temperature through the little hole that you made. But these companies were very large.